Crown Journeys is a series of books wherein well-known authors travel
within or to chosen places and write about it. Michael Cunningham did
Provincetown (Land’s End); Christopher Buckley did Washington, D.C.
(Washington Schlepped Here); Chuck Palahniuk did Portland, Ore.
(Fugitives and Refugees), and Frank Conroy did Nantucket (Time and
Tide). With Wandering Home, the 14th book in the series, Bill McKibben
tackles the wilds of Vermont and New York.

McKibben, a visiting scholar at Middlebury College, has lived in the
Adirondacks for some time; he’s established a habit of attending to
nature (as in The End of Nature, his 1987 book about global warming, and
Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age). So it is fitting that he
should chronicle a rambling hike from Ripton, Vt., to Crane Mountain in
New York, stopping to chat with environmentalist acquaintances and
earnest college students, crossing Lake Champlain, sleeping under the
sky, getting muddy and brush-scratched as he goes.

Two things make this account special. One, its subject: those of us
familiar with this Lake Champlain Valley / Adirondack area, not so far
from New Hampshire (extending right into it, perhaps), can easily agree
with McKibben that it “constitutes one of the world’s few great regions,
a place more complete, and more full of future promise, than any other
spot in the American atlas.” Two, McKibben’s pointed observation that
“People are trying things here.” This is more than a
see-the-pretty-trees story; it is about Middlebury’s cooperative cheese
plant, college students learning to succeed at small farming, residents
negotiating sustainable use of the forest, people striving for energy
independence (solar pumps, biodiesel, soybean oil). McKibben engages in
some discourse about Earth First! versus civilization and comes down
with ease on the side of those who say nature’s nice and we are part of
it.

McKibben confides that he was not always a back-to-nature man. He went
from college straight to The New Yorker magazine to write the “Talk of
the Town” column — “about as urban a job as it’s possible to imagine,”
he says — but in his mid-20s he wrote an account of where every pipe and
wire in his Manhattan apartment came from and went to, and everything
changed because he “had the sudden insight that the physical world
actually mattered.”

The book, a small, quick read, imparts a nice sense of a place and a
nice sense of the world’s mattering.